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Contributor

Michele Hutchison

Portrait of translator Michele Hutchinson

Photo © Maaike Koning, 2016

Contributor

Michele Hutchison

United Kingdom

Michele Hutchison was born in the UK and has lived in Amsterdam since 2004. She was educated at UEA, Cambridge, and Lyon universities. She translates literary fiction and nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels, and children’s books....

Recent translations include works by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Raoul Deleo, Octavie Wolters, Gerda Blees, and Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, with whom she shared the 2020 International Booker Prize for The Discomfort of Evening. She is also co-author of the successful parenting book The Happiest Kids in the World.

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Articles by Michele Hutchison

Family in a tunnel

Photo by Lute on Unsplash

Because of a Woman: Two Poems

By Babeth Fonchie Fotchind

I would praise your bravery when you were twenty-eight / when you boarded an airbus a330 a child in tow

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

Shadows in a dark room

Photo by Parker Coffman on Unsplash

Ancestors: Two Poems

By Alfred Schaffer

well you’re right we’re stone dead / nothing to worry about

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

MultimediaMultilingual

A flowering wisteria branch

Photo by Owen Yin on Unsplash

Black and White: Three Poems

By Nisrine Mbarki

they speak different languages but will learn each other’s

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

Multilingual

First Read—From “Roxy”

By Esther Gerritsen

In Esther Gerritsen's Roxy, translated by Michele Hutchison and out this week with World Editions, a young woman named Roxy struggles to move on after her husband is killed in a car crash along…

Translated by Michele Hutchison

What the Happiest Kids in the World Are Reading

By Michele Hutchison

Translator Michele Hutchison, co-author (with Rina Mae Acosta) of The Happiest Kids in the World: How Dutch Parents Help their Kids by Doing Less, explores the relationship between happiness and the books…

On Translating Jeroen Janssen

By Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison’s translation of an excerpt of Jeroen Janssen’s Abadaringi appears in the July 2017 issue: Divided Countries. Last year WWB asked me to edit a feature on Flemish literature.When…

from Abadaringi

By Jeroen Janssen

Those are things you mustn't ask questions about. Some people get sad.

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

“Her Entire Existence Was an Emergency”: Human Relationships in Flemish Literature

By Michele Hutchison

Flemish literature at its best is linguistically pyrotechnic, daring, and original.

What You’ve Given Up Hoping for Counts Twice as Much, She’d Discovered

By Griet Op de Beeck

In general Kathleen didn’t look at the contents of toilet bowls, but in this case it didn’t take much to notice the colossus.

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

Multilingual

Forty-four Years Later

By Michaël Olbrechts

I'm going to take you to the interbellum period, to 1936.

Translated by Michele Hutchison

Craving

By Esther Gerritsen

“You’re not likely to live a long time with something like this.”

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison

From “Comfort”

By Ronald Giphart

In previous centuries practically everybody got a regular and considerable dose of mind expansion because practically everybody ate rye bread.

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison